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Grafana vs Superset: What are the differences?
What is Grafana? Open source Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor. Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
What is Superset? Data exploration and visualization platform, by Airbnb. Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.
Grafana can be classified as a tool in the "Monitoring Tools" category, while Superset is grouped under "Business Intelligence".
Some of the features offered by Grafana are:
- Create, edit, save & search dashboards
- Change column spans and row heights
- Drag and drop panels to rearrange
On the other hand, Superset provides the following key features:
- A rich set of visualizations to analyze your data, as well as a flexible way to extend the capabilities
- An extensible, high granularity security model allowing intricate rules on who can access which features, and integration with major authentication providers (database, OpenID, LDAP, OAuth & REMOTE_USER through Flask AppBuiler)
- A simple semantic layer, allowing to control how data sources are displayed in the UI, by defining which fields should show up in which dropdown and which aggregation and function (metrics) are made available to the user
"Beautiful" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Grafana, while over 2 developers mention "Awesome interactive filtering" as the leading cause for choosing Superset.
Grafana and Superset are both open source tools. It seems that Grafana with 29.7K GitHub stars and 5.64K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Superset with 25.1K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Grafana has a broader approval, being mentioned in 579 company stacks & 325 developers stacks; compared to Superset, which is listed in 18 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:
- Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
- Able to display automation test results,
- System monitoring / Nginx API,
- Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.
Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.
You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.
We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.
this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/
I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.
From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."
For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana
- Grafana based demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdTB2AcU4Sg
- Kibana based reporting screenshot: https://imgur.com/vuVvZKN
Kibana has predictions
and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).
For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:
- Creating and organizing visualization panels
- Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
- Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
- Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics
After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .
I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.
Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).
@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.
Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.
Pros of Grafana
- Beautiful88
- Graphs are interactive68
- Free57
- Easy56
- Nicer than the Graphite web interface34
- Many integrations25
- Can build dashboards18
- Can collaborate on dashboards10
- Easy to specify time window10
- Dashboards contain number tiles9
- Click and drag to zoom in5
- Integration with InfluxDB5
- Open Source5
- Authentification and users management4
- Threshold limits in graphs4
- Simple and native support to Prometheus3
- It is open to cloud watch and many database3
- Alerts3
- You can visualize real time data to put alerts2
- You can use this for development to check memcache2
- Great community support2
- Plugin visualizationa0
- Grapsh as code0
Pros of Superset
- Awesome interactive filtering11
- Wide SQL database support6
- Free6
- Shareable & editable dashboards6
- Great for data collaborating on data exploration5
- User & Role Management3
- Easy to share charts & dasboards3
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Superset
- Link diff db together "Data Modeling "4
- It is difficult to install on the server3
- Ugly GUI3